New York|She’s Trying to Pull an Ocasio-Cortez. Her Target: Pete King.

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She’s Trying to Pull an Ocasio-Cortez. Her Target: Pete King.

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Liuba Grechen Shirley, center, a Democratic newcomer, is challenging the Republican Peter T. King, who has represented Long Islanders in Congress for 25 years. CreditCreditJohnny Milano for The New York Times

SAYVILLE, N.Y. — On the list of possibly endangered Republican House incumbents in New York, Representative Peter T. King would seem the least likely candidate to be extinguished in November.

Mr. King has been in office for 25 years, trouncing his Democratic opponents with biennial regularity, his career marked by episodic breaks with his party on issues that would adversely affect his constituents on Long Island. He is the most visible Republican in the New York delegation.

And yet, in a year when anti-President Trump furor is expected to drive a blue wave of voters to the polls, nothing in politics is sacred, and anything is theoretically possible — especially in New York.

Not too far across the Queens-Nassau border, Mr. King’s longtime colleague, Representative Joseph Crowley, the No. 4 Democrat in the House, lost in the June primary to a political newcomer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Could Mr. King suffer a similar fate in the general election? He does not seem overly worried.

“I am running on my record,” Mr. King said in an interview. “I get things done, whether it’s ISIS, the Gateway tunnel, Sandy funding or MS-13. On MS-13, I got President Trump to come here. I don’t think any president has ever come into Long Island on an issue before. They come to raise money or campaign.”

If there were to be a Crowley-like upset, there would need to be a Democrat cast in the role, if not the mold, of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Liuba Grechen Shirley believes she can be that person.

The granddaughter of Russian immigrants and the daughter of a single mother who teaches in public schools, Ms. Grechen Shirley previously worked in global economic development and human rights for nonprofit groups, as well as at the United Nations Foundation and New York University.

After President Trump was elected, she formed a local group of Indivisible, the liberal grass-roots network, on Long Island, where she had settled with her husband in her hometown, Amityville.

She organized rallies and letter-writing campaigns, directing her anger at Representative King. She said she objected to his vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, as well as his views on everything from abortion (he is against it) to the administration’s polarizing travel ban (he was a vocal supporter).

Before she launched her campaign last October, she put together a PowerPoint presentation that laid out why she believed Mr. King was vulnerable, recapping past challengers and the relatively small sums they had raised. “I was waiting for the right person to run against him,” Ms. Grechen Shirley, 37, said in an interview, “and a few months later, I realized I was that person.”

This week, she released a new campaign video that highlights her role as a suburban mother and political activist. With stirring music and polished editing, it evokes the Ocasio-Cortez campaign video that went viral in the days before she defeated Mr. Crowley.

“I was told that with two kids, a husband who works full time and no child care, that it was impossible,” Ms. Grechen Shirley intones in the video, referring to her congressional campaign. “Well, it wasn’t impossible. It’s just really hard.”

Indeed, after declaring her candidacy last fall, Ms. Grechen Shirley struggled to make it all work. Even though her mother cared for her two very young children, ages 2 and 4, in the afternoon, the campaign was becoming a full-time job.

She petitioned the Federal Election Commission, asking if she could use some of her campaign donations to pay for child care. Two dozen members of Congress wrote letters on her behalf, along with Hillary Clinton, and in the end, the commission decided in her favor.

“We broke a boundary,” Ms. Grechen Shirley said. “It’s difficult to take a year off of your life without a salary and still juggle child care, a mortgage and taxes. There’s a reason there are so many people who are independently wealthy in Congress.”

The decision not only helped Ms. Grechen Shirley pay for a caregiver, it gave her national exposure and honed her message in an uphill battle against Mr. King.

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Mr. King is the most visible Republican in New York’s congressional delegation.CreditCliff Owen/Associated Press

Republican and Democratic strategists familiar with the political landscape of Long Island agree that Mr. King might not be safe, despite his long tenure. The 2nd Congressional District, straddling the Nassau and Suffolk County border, was redrawn in 2012 so that registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans by some 5,000.

Peter Ragone, who has advised prominent Democrats including Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, grew up in Merrick, a hamlet in Nassau County.

“What I would say about this cycle is that a lot of the people who were Trump voters are certainly second-guessing their decision,” he said. “King has been there for 25 years, and if I’m a working-class guy from that district, I promise you nobody’s life has gotten better. A working- and middle-class salary doesn’t cut it like it used to.”

William F. B. O’Reilly, a Republican strategist based in Westchester County, said that Representative King should be “somewhat insulated” from a potential blue wave in November.

Mr. King certainly has a record of serving his district. He was instrumental in securing $60 billion in federal aid after Hurricane Sandy devastated the New York region. In March, he buttonholed President Trump at a St. Patrick’s Day luncheon to preserve funding for the Gateway rail tunnel project under the Hudson River.

“But the worry will be Democrats coming out specifically to punish Donald Trump — voters who might not normally come out in the midterms,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “In a suburban district like King’s, it’s all going to be about turnout.”

Mr. King has agreed to debate Ms. Grechen Shirley on Sept. 8.

Aware of the district’s political shift, Mr. King emphasized in an interview the times he had distanced himself from — and even denounced — Mr. Trump. He cited his criticism of the president’s recent meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki and Mr. Trump’s comments after the violent rally by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., a year ago. (Mr. King was uncontested in the Republican primary.)

Mr. King also voted against Mr. Trump’s signature legislative achievement, the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017. While he supported the cuts themselves, he said he objected to the law’s elimination of the full deduction for state and local taxes, a change that disproportionally impacted high-tax — and largely blue — states like New York and California.

Mr. King also promoted his ability to work with Democrats. He was ranked No. 10 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives in last year’s bipartisan index put out by the Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. In two previous years, he was ranked No. 1.

Ms. Grechen Shirley dismissed this as bipartisan boasting, saying in an interview that on a number of hot-button issues, like the environment and abortion, he leaned to the right.

As for her chances against a Republican Party stalwart, Ms. Grechen Shirley, who won the Democratic primary with 58 percent of the vote, sounded confident. She has won endorsements from Senator Elizabeth Warren and Governor Cuomo, who recently campaigned with her.

“This is a winnable district,” she said. “Nobody has campaigned against King like this before. We have knocked on 50,000 doors and made more than 80,000 phone calls. We’ve built a very broad coalition.”

At a recent meet-and-greet house party, Ms. Grechen Shirley mingled with three dozen voters, along with a volunteer, Cathy Lyons, who said she had voted for Mr. King in every one of his elections. After President Trump was elected, however, she joined a new local progressive group.

“I feel like she is one of us,” said Ms. Lyons, a teaching assistant and mother of four who has lived in Sayville for 30 years. “I feel like things are going so negatively. We need new blood and younger people. We need to move the country more positively instead of divisively.”

Ms. Grechen Shirley has so far raised more than $700,000, more than Mr. King’s last five challengers combined — but she had only $186,000 cash on hand at the end of June. Mr. King had more than $3 million cash on hand, accumulated from earlier cycles, but would not say how much he planned to spend.

“We’ll see,” he said. “If it’s close, I will do whatever I have to do.”

If Ms. Grechen Shirley is fashioning herself as the suburban version of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Mr. King is quick to draw a distinction between Representative Crowley and himself. Mr. Crowley was faulted for being out of touch with his district.

“I’m not being critical of Joe Crowley, but people see me, they know me,” he said. “I am always working.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Progressive Challenger On Long Island Faces A Confident Veteran. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe